Bodies as territories: Revisiting the Coloniality of Gender

In this article, I reconsider the coloniality of gender in light of Trans* anti-colonial contributions and feminist and women’s social movements’ mobilisation of the multidimensional concept of ‘territorio-cuerpo-tierra’ (territory-body-land) in contemporary Abya Yala. I ask what might be gained in centring the reconceptualisation of the relationship between gender and bodies offered by these activists and scholars within the theorisation of gender and coloniality opened by María Lugones. The article starts by revisiting Lugones and related decolonial and non-binary approaches to gender that highlight the coloniality of knowledge informing medical and racist constructions of gender, to then examine different approaches to territory-body-land as contemporarily mobilised against gender-based violence and femi and trans-cide in Abya Yala. I locate this examination in the context of increasingly authoritarian forms of social precarisation and exclusion, where the question of gender has become centre stage. Against these reactionary trends, these popular social movements’ use of the trope of bodies as territories foregrounds the differentially gendered bodily dimension of this politics in promising ways. Ultimately, the article sheds light on the need to centre coloniality in the gendering of democratic claims.